Taking my stand in central Queens.

The Gracchi and Distributism

Kenneth Spence recently posted an odd response on the Acton Institute’s blog to John Medaille’s defense of distributism, published over at Dappled Things. Spence describes the failure of the Gracchi’s attempts to curtail the concentration of land into the hands of a few investors at the expense of the Roman citizen-farmers who had been the bulwark of the Republic. “As Rome grew,” he explains,

the army was no longer made up of farmers who tilled their fields six or nine months out of the year, so that by the time of the Gracchi, the citizen farmer class upon which the Republic had been built was basically extinct. The rich could buy out the farms of whomever they wished, and more and more common families left their lands and moved to the capital, where they lived as dependents on the public. In an attempt to save the Republic, Tiberius moved to redistribute the land and prevent the rich from buying it up in large tracts…

He claims that their failure (Tiberius was assassinated, and Gaius driven to death, by tetchy land speculators in the Senate) was a lesson for modern defenders of distributism: If, he says, “there is anything to be learned from the failure of the Gracchi, it is that a distributist system is, if not totally impossible to implement, certainly a cure worse than the disease.”

The logic is wonderful. Apparently, according to Spence, the difficulty of social reform (and the murder of social reformers) proves that reform would be “certainly a cure worse than the disease,” and should not be retried. Gotta say I’m glad that William Wilberforce didn’t subscribe to his blog. Not to mention MLK.

Plutarch’s assessment– which Spence quotes, in order to disagree with– was quite different.

What could be more just and honorable than their first design, had not the power and the faction of the rich, by endeavoring to abrogate that law, engaged them both in those fatal quarrels?

Huh? This may be an object lesson in what the Acton Institute does to one’s mind. The upper classes had stolen the land of the soldier-farmers while they were off defending the Republic. Tiberius tried to get it back, and was assassinated. It wasn’t clear to me that Spence disagreed with the thieves and murderers, but perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Gaius abandoned the idea of getting the land back, and settled for making the former soldier-farmers wards of the state. The position of the Roosevelt cousins has been compared to the Gracchi brothers; Theodore tried to restore the power of the middle class and the midwestern farmers, while Franklin realized that wasn’t going to happen, and just tried to negotiate a better deal for them.

It’s a bit late to “reform” capitalism. It’s in its death throes. You cannot blame the distributists for that; it is a clear case of suicide.

@spencekenneth: If something is actually wrong, I don’t think you can justify inaction because it is not as dramatically wrong as it might be, and because your action might lead to… I don’t know, upheavals of various kinds. This just seems like a recipe for passivity. Social stability is a precious thing, and possibly living in a non-war-torn country allows me to be cavalier about it. But (cue appropriate music for high-flown pontificating) you can’t buy stability at the cost of injustice. That’s too expensive, I think, and ends up in any case being an investment that would never get a high rating from Moody’s.

@John: “a clear case of suicide:” But nothing like as tidy as throwing itself on its sword.

Also, mos def re: the Acton Institute Effect. Which is a shame. One of my collection of jobs is crewing on a schooner out of South Street Seaport– we do these two-hour cruises around New York Harbor, and people take pictures of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and so forth. A couple of weeks ago this one guy (visiting I think from the Dominican Republic) came on the boat, and he was wearing a T-shirt that had “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absoutely” on it. I got him to let me take a picture of him with my phone, complete with the Acton quote and the Statue of Liberty in the background. I kind of wanted to send it to the Institute, but I just don’t want to ENCOURAGE them in their wrong-headed libertarianism! Plus I think I accidentally erased the picture.

I do think it’s a recipe for passivity of a kind! Revolution is serious business, and most importantly, there’s no telling where it will go once you start it off–the French monarchy wasn’t a paragon of just rule, but the end product of the French Revolution was nastier.

As for the history of the Gracchi–by the time you have soldier farmers gone for enough of the year that their land can be snatched up by the rich, you’ve lost the support of the Republic, no?